Related Articles

Dalko, perhaps the hardest-throwing pitcher in baseball history, was a wild-armed minor leaguer from 1957-65. His chances of ever reaching the majors flamed out after six injury-ravaged games for the San Jose Bees in ’65.

There are no reliable radar gun readings from Dalko’s days, so the legend will have to suffice. Longtime major leaguer Jay Johnstone was a teammate on that ’65 Bees team and also faced the right-hander at a previous stop.

“I actually saw him throw a ball that went through the backstop, through the screen, and hit a metal chair,” Johnstone, who went on to spend 15 full seasons in the majors.

“There was nobody in that metal chair, fortunately. All you could hear was this r-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-n-g from the ball hitting it.

“We were like, ‘Holy crap! Who wants to hit next?’ Everybody was looking at the coach, and the coach was like, ‘Don’t look at me!'”

How hard did Dalko throw?

“If we had to put a gun on it, I’d say, without bragging or jumping to conclusions, it was well over 100 mph,” Johnstone said in a phone interview this spring. “Maybe 115, 120.”

That estimate would be easy to dismiss if Johnstone hadn’t also seen a few other fireballers in their prime.

“Nolan Ryan threw hard. J.R. Richard threw hard. There are a couple of other guys who have thrown the ball really, really hard,” Johnstone said. “But not with that velocity.”

Steven Louis Dalkowski Jr., listed at 5-foot-11, 175 pounds, was the most anticipated pitching prospect in Baltimore Orioles history when he was signed as an 18-year-old. In high school. One of Dalkowski’s catchers used to cushion his mitt with raw beef to soften the blow.

But the pitcher never learned to harness that nuclear power. Over the final weeks of the 1959 season, he walked 80 batters in 25 innings with Class D Pensacola.

While pitching for the Stockton Ports in 1960, Dalko stuck out 262 hitters — and walked 262. The kicker: he did it in 170 innings.

Such was the theme of his career.

“Sometimes he didn’t know where it was going,” Johnstone said.

With Dalkowski, it’s sometimes difficult to separate fact from fiction, so confirming Johnstone’s account of a screen-busting pitch is a challenge. John-William Greenbaum is writing a book about the pitcher and documented a few occasions in the late ’50s when the pitcher nicknamed “White Lightning” really did rifle one through a screen. But he adds a caveat: Some minor league backstops in those days were nothing more than rusted chicken wire.

Moreover, some of Dalkowski’s early managers encouraged him to let loose with an intentionally wayward warm-up pitch to scare the daylights out of opposing hitters.

In that regard, the pitcher was a smashing success.

“He was a legend,” said George Sherrod, a fellow pitcher on that ’65 Bees team. “Everybody who was playing ball back in those days knew who Steve Dalkowski was. There were all kinds of stories about him.”

Dalkowski made some progress after a few minor league seasons. He looked poised to finally crack the majors in 1963. But he sustained an elbow injury while playing winter league ball during the ’62 off-season.

He tried to pitch through it, aggravated the injury during spring training and was never the same again.

By the time he arrived with the San Jose Bees — at the time, a California Angels affiliate — Dalkowski’s velocity had dipped into the low 90s, according to Greenbaum.

Over six starts for San Jose, Dalkowski was 2-3 with a 4.74 ERA, with 33 strikeouts and 34 walks in 38.0 innings. He was released in spring training the following season.

Dalko was scary all the way to the end. (Among those who who saw him from the stands was Linda Pereira, who grew up to become the San Jose Giants director of player personnel.) Johnstone, meanwhile, said he’d been taught by veteran hitters that the best way to hit a good heater was to stand in the back in the box as a way of buying a few more milliseconds of reaction time.

“He threw the ball so hard that I would step back almost 12 inches,” Johnstone said. “I was almost on the catcher’s lap.”

He said he saw another hitter scoot even farther away, albeit more out of fear than strategy.

“The umpire had to tell him to get back in the box,” Johnstone said. “He said, ‘You can’t swing from there.’ ”

Dalkowski’s final career minor league totals are often incomplete in most listings, but for his book Greenbaum pored through every box score and re-tabulated: 995 innings pitched, 682 hits allowed, 1,396 strikeouts and 1,354 walks.

Dalkowski is now 77 and dealing with dementia and living in an assisted living facility in his native Connecticut. He made a cameo in the 2016 documentary “Fastball” and lives on in the minds of those who saw him.

“He was amazing,” Sherrod said. “He had such a quick delivery. Everything went into every pitch he threw. So it was something that was really unique — let’s put it like that.”